SMASS expert: That puts it as a juvenile, probably a year or so old,
maybe just over a year old I would think.
last year’s calf I’m guessing,
so you know, adults are pretty much three times that length.
a newborn would be about four and a half meters
so thats, thats a calf from last year.
Cal Major: Yeah, Yeah.
I’m Cal major,
I’m a vet, I’m an advocate for our ocean and for nature
and a filmmaker, and I’m an adventurer.
So 2021 I was stand up paddleboarding around the whole of Scotland.
And I’d come round to the East Coast.
I woke up to beautiful weather, the water was really still and calm
which is amazing for stand up paddleboarding.
Paddling from this incredible little tiny harbor
past amazing rock stacks, rock formations, incredible heritage places
like a Whaligoe steps, past bird colonies, puffin colonies, Guillemots.
This is one of the most amazing paddles I’ve ever done.
There are birds, everywhere!
It was a really, really special day on the water.
It felt really peaceful and calm, and I felt like I was just surrounded
by amazing nature everywhere.
I couldn’t have imagined the contrast between the morning,
to what I was about to find in the afternoon.
So I saw something floating on the horizon.
I couldn’t really see what it was because it was about a mile away.
So I decided to paddle out to have a little look at it.
As I got closer and closer to this big floaty white thing,
the water started getting really oily
and there were flocks of Fulmar all around it.
The smell was horrendous.
As I got closer
I realised,
that it was a dead whale.
It took a moment to register what it was that we had found.
I was still convinced it was going to be a big block of plastic.
That’s what I’d hoped we’d found.
Not a dead whale.
When we did come across it, it was almost this kind of
adrenaline fueled reaction of, okay, this is what we found,
and so we went into this very kind of clinical mode of
‘we need to capture this, because this is really important’,
and at that point in time, I had to really suppress
what I was feeling and just get everything we possibly could.
captured on cameras.
But we didn’t immediately know why it had died.
We could see that it had been dead for at least a few days.
It was starting to decompose.
It was really smelly
and so I paddled quite close to it, which was quite distressing,
and found ropes wrapped around its pectoral fins,
and then I followed those ropes back to its tail where I put a GoPro
in the water and found that the tail stock was completely entangled with ropes.
And there was actually a rope leading down towards the seabed with lobster pots
attached to it.
This is really tragic to see, these are really rare animals in these waters.
It’s very very highly likely that this whale has died
as a result of entanglement in fishing gear.
This is absolutely devastating.
It wasn’t just finding a dead body.
I’m quite used to seeing dead animals as a vet,
that sounds really morbid, but I’m quite used to seeing a dead animal.
It was more the implications, the fact that this was a juvenile whale.
This is a potentially one year old humpback whale who had not only died, but
potentially suffered quite significantly as a result of that entanglement.
I didn’t really have time to process any of this until I got back to land
and I paddled back into land,
I’d been out on the water for something like 8 hours that day.
I was quite exhausted
and the adrenaline was just starting to crash from having found the whale.
And James put the camera on me and said, You know, how you feeling?
And I, I literally had no words.
I felt really devastated, but I also felt angry.
I felt frustrated that this huge, important animal, this, you know,
juvenile animal, had managed to succumb
to human activity in that way, that it was
just felt so wrong and I
felt so hopeless and helpless
because what could I do about that?
A Humpback calf, floating upside down,
and the thing is now what do I translate that to what do I do?
how do I make, how do I turn that into action?
Oh dear.
My instant reaction was definitely one of despair and feeling like
I really needed to do something about this because this was such an injustice.
It’s so unfair that a massive cetacean
that belongs in our ocean cannot swim through our waters.
I think one of the reasons I was most affected by this
is that the humpbacks, they live in family groups.
The calves stay with their mothers until they’re about a year old.
They have this close family bond.
I think as well with whales, we really relate to them.
They’re such intelligent creatures and we’re learning so much more all the time
about their culture, about their family groups,
about the way they communicate with each other.
You know, you look into the eye of a cetacean, of a whale, of a dolphin,
and you feel like you’re looking into a creature that’s very similar to you.
The idea that a calf could have been lost amongst this group of humpbacks
and the implications for them as well
and the impact that it might have had on them felt quite painful.
Over the next 18 months between the incident happening and now.
That kind of anger and frustration
has definitely morphed and evolved, and I feel differently about it
now, having spoken to lots and lots of people who are working
in this field and learning about the hard work
that’s going on to help mitigate this and the measures that are out there
which are being trialed to help stop cetacean entanglement in Scottish waters.
It’s also really important
to remember that entanglement in fishing gear is never intentional
and actually it can be quite distressing, for fishers who find animals entangled in their gear.
So I think it’s really essential
that we don’t actually demonize a particular group of people
but work with them to help solve these issues.
And that is exactly what the crew of fishermen in Scotland are trying to do,
is trying to solve these issues
looking back, it still affects me to this day.
But I think it’s changed from having been a really devastating thing to experience,
to having had quite a positive impact on my understanding of entanglement.
You hear about entanglement, but it’s so intangible.
It’s such this kind of
‘out there in the ocean’ issue, and then seeing it yourself, seeing this
enormous animal having succumbed to entanglement is very, very different
seeing actually for yourself
So it’s estimated that globally 300,000
whales and dolphins every year are caught up in fishing gear.
But we have no real idea
of what the actual numbers are, because for every animal that we find
caught up in fishing gear, there could be another one
that’s out to sea, lost out to sea or at the bottom of the sea.
We need to keep working hard and to keep coming together
and supporting those at the forefront of this work
so that we can find solutions as fast as possible.
Without hope we have no reason to keep moving forward and to keep making positive change.
But at the same time, the issues facing our seas are so enormous,
and I found that quite difficult
in telling this story to make sure that it wasn’t just a tale of hopelessness
and of devastation, but that actually we take note
of the good stuff that’s happening in the positive movements forward
to help create safer oceans, for cetaceans.
